Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday November 02, 2011 @06:17PM
from the it's-coming-up-tablets dept.

MrSeb writes "When the Microsoft-Nokia strategic alliance was first announced in February, there was absolutely no mention of money: Nokia, seemingly on its own accord, had decided that Windows Phone 7 was the future of its smartphone efforts. A week later it emerged that Microsoft and Google had been competing for Nokia's affections — a bidding war that concluded with Microsoft agreeing to pay Nokia billions of dollars to help market and develop Windows phones. Fast forward to today and Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is making rather odd comments about the tablet market: 'There’s a new tablet opportunity coming. We see the opportunity,' Elop said to Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday. Furthermore, he had only positive things to say about Windows 8 — that it's a "supercharged" version of WP7, but for tablets. Does that sound like Nokia is planning to bring out a Windows 8-powered tablet? Is it possible that Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar agreement with Nokia also included Windows 8?"

A week later it emerged that Microsoft and Google had been competing for Nokia's affections — a bidding war that concluded with Microsoft agreeing to pay Nokia billions of dollars to help market and develop Windows phones.

This actually gives an interesting new perspective to the whole Google-Motorola thing. So Google wanted Nokia, but was forced to settle for a crappier competitor because Microsoft offered more for Nokia. This means Motorola will always be the "damn I really wanted her instead.. why I had to settle for this bitch?" for Google, while Microsoft got the dream girl.

Yeah, except that they just released an awesome N9 phone (based on Linux too), and WP7 phones are starting to roll out. Later they're thinking of using Linux on their low-end phones. It takes time to change your line-up as much as Nokia did, but they're going to be a serious competitor now. Microsoft actually saved them. They would have gone down the toilet if they had continued with the Symbian stuff and not getting anything new done.

Yeah, except that they just released an awesome N9 phone (based on Linux too), and WP7 phones are starting to roll out. Later they're thinking of using Linux on their low-end phones. It takes time to change your line-up as much as Nokia did, but they're going to be a serious competitor now. Microsoft actually saved them. They would have gone down the toilet if they had continued with the Symbian stuff and not getting anything new done.

I expect Microsoft to flext their muscle and Nokia to quietly retire Linux anything quietly.

Windows phone may be late to the ball and look more like a frog than a princess, but that won't stop them trying to push it as one, until it goes the way of the Zune and Nokia is left in tatters.

hi there, nokia shareholders, pr personnel and others. please, tell elop to gallop the fuck off nokia. n9 is the thing that should not be killed by incredibly reluctant willingness to even sell it, not to mention furthering development.

If you design a new UI that's simpler (according to them) then by definition other smartphone UIs could be termed as "complicated" in their marketing materials.

I like the WP7 UI but the lack of apps makes the platform a non-starter with me. Android while nice, I fear that I would be left out of eventual OS upgrades depending on the whim of the handset maker. iOS is nice but now that they have made it almost impossible to downgrade the OS Apple will push updates to the OS that make it run like shit on earli

Not really, because Motorola has been succesful in the modern smartphone era, whilst Nokia has been nothing other than an epic fail.

Google didn't stand a chance anyway, with Elop at the helm Nokia effectively was taken over by Microsoft. That may not be the legal status but make no mistake, it was a coup by Microsoft, they ousted both the anti-Microsoft leadership and developers at Nokia.

I wouldn't be suprised, should Nokia start to have a succesful Windows 8 business down the line to see Microsoft take ove

As an owner of an N900 - the single most open phone one can get - It saddens me to witness the death throes of something that had the potential to be really liberating. My N900 is a joy to use, and the N9 looks like it is too.

Here's to countless years of IOS, Android and Windows drudgery. I'll just open the fully functional terminal app on my N900, play with apt and think about what could've been.

Or get a new device and install the OS you want on it. If Meamo is that good someone will surely port it to new devices. The N9 would have been something, if it was released 6-12 months ago. Instead I will get a galaxy nexus and install Debian in a chroot.

Maemo is dead because it has no point. It was designed to be a broad stroke at making a base layer (like Apple's Darwin) that had some compatibility, with the idea that vendors would cook up their own UI and branding on the OS.

My buddy has worked on Maemo and Moblin and Meego for the past couple of years, and while he liked it he could never answer my question - "Why choose Maemo when I can just use Debian or Ubuntu or Ret Hat instead? After all *THEY ARE ALREADY HERE!!!!*"

Get familiar with soldering the USB port legs on better when the warranty is out. If that isn't possible, find someone who will. While you can use the alternate ports for charging and data, it is not recommended.

The N900 is probably one of the rarest combinations around for having:

Full control out of the box: add rootsh or enable r&d mode.Massive storage for its time: 32GB EMMC + 1GB memory + SDHC slot. USB host for more if you use a custom ker

In Spanish the slang (and 'bad' words) are highly regional, much like 'bloody' is bad in England but means nothing in American. Except there are more countries with Spanish as their native language, so there are more differences.

In the case of Lumia, in some places (Galicia) it refers to a mythological creature. In other places it means a lively girl, and is considered a compliment. In other places, of course, it is a whore. RAE lists it as a whore, but also suggests it is used infrequently.

Neither article mentioned anything about whether Nokia's hinted Windows 8 tablets would end up using an x86 CPU such as Intel's Atom or an ARM CPU. Atom tablets can fall back to the classic Win32 desktop, such as when docked to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. ARM tablets cannot because all they have is the WinRT with the Metro front-end and Windows Store lockdown.

I would expect that consumer tablets would mainly be ARM, while "enterprise" ones would be x86. The only maker of a non-Windows "enterprise" tablet today is Lenovo, with its Honeycomb Thinkpad Tablet - which is a pretty impressive piece of hardware in its own right. So, if anything, I would expect them to be the first on x86 Win8 tablet bandwagon.

I'd like to see some citation for those statements about ARM not having the desktop mode. Microsoft has stated that the two architectures will have identical builds, and demo'd Office for ARM running in desktop mode.

Not vapor, Nokia will produce Windows 7 phones and I believe they will also do Windows 8 tablets. Let's face it, if your company were sinking, you'd clutch at anything, even if it didn't float.

M$ seems to genuinely believe that they will have some significant presence in the smartphone and tablet markets. Having a strong tie (or ownership depending on what rumors you believe) of a hardware company that makes those gadgets is a reasonable step for them to take. I can even imagine that M$ was having trouble shopping Windows Phone 7 to many of the other manufacturers, so basically has to buy the business to achieve market penetration.

Will any of this work? I don't think so. I don't believe M$ will ever achieve a significant portion of either markets. The advantage is, they still has their core business to keep them going when it's time to throw Nokia overboard.

> After what happened with Xbox, I wouldn't underestimate MS' staying power. They'll keep going until they get it right.

It's possible, but I don't think they'll ever get this right. There is a difference on a basic level: Successful businesses in smartphone and tablet markets created an interface appropriate for the device. Microsoft insists on re-using GUI technology from Windows, which isn't appropriate either for a smartphone or a tablet. So the Windows 7 Mobile and Windows 8 devices will always

Yes, I was in the Verizon store the other day, buying a new Android phone for my daughter (bionic) and wife (rhyme), and I did spend a few moments with the one (1) Windows Phone 7 on display. The interface reminded me of Vista Gadgets, and I suspect it's not really an interface but a big Gadget running on top of Windows. If you're only interested in doing what the interface provides, you're in luck.

Windows 8 has some visual cues from Phone 7, but the demos I saw, Metro looks like a souped up Media Center,

Oh, sorry, they just paid an assload of money to get licenses for every bit of tech Nokia has,

[citation needed]

and to get Nokia to drop everything but Windows.

Nokia did not drop anything that has a potential to make money. Contrast with being a giant R&D sinkhole with not quite enough to show for it. But I sense another rabid FOSS fan who thinks that all Linux-based projects are bound to succeed unless stopped by an evil hand of M$ (spelling mandatory), no matter how these projects were run.

70%? Down, fanboy, down!
When will you Android boosters realize that you are not Google's customers? Nor are the phone companies, for that matter. You are the product that Google is selling to its actual customers, the advertisers.

He never said we're customers. And we (though I don't see myself as an Android 'booster') do realize Google lives off of our information. The difference between Google and some other companies is that Google doesn't hide that fact.:)
(apart from that, 70% is a 'tad' high, indeed:D)

Microsoft will continue to be a niche player while android heads towards 70% marketshare by next year. Any marketshare that microsoft happens to garner will be at the expense of apple as their marketshare dwindles.

Are you a bit confused? We are talking about tablets here, not phones. Your number even for phones is way off but that is besides the point.

In the tablet space, Apple's iOS has 70% marketshare if you go by "shipped" numbers for android tablets but sales to end users numbers probably put Apple at 90%+.

You obviously haven't been following the controversy over MS decision to ramrod the Metro interface down everybody's throat. In other words, one won't get the start menu even if one wanted to - and not only that, it's lost on the desktop as well.

So instead of paying the usual M$ tax by buying an Android, one pays the full price of Windows 8, which ultimately goes to M$, and then one deletes it and replaces it w/ Android, and this time, not paying M$ a dime for Android.

I didn't say anything about being "cheated". I was thinking more in terms of M$ subsidizing devices to achieve market penetration. *Those* are the devices you might want to try flashing Android onto. But only if the price is right. There's no reason to pay more than you have to, especially in this economy.

If you invest $100 in Nokia today, what will it be worth in 1 and 5 years?

Nobody can tell the future, but I'd guess $99.95 and $314.16

People hate surprises, stock valuations are driven mostly by people's emotional reactions. We can wish MS to fade into oblivion, but it's a little too big for that to happen very quickly, same for Nokia. Will they resurge like Apple did? Probably not, but I think they'll limp along and occasionally surprise the way IBM has for the last 20 years.

I was rooting for Nokia and Qt to take over the world, Apple style, starting the day after Steve Jobs died... guess that didn't happen.

On the other hand, a Windows 8 4G phone, with true (2005 era) desktop power in an always with me form factor with high quality GPS and camera and (LISTEN UP DESIGNERS) several days of battery life, while not exactly sexy and appealing as a open source Finnish superphone, would be a damn practical device - I'd actually like it better than an iPhone or Droid.

Either a much larger battery is needed, which impacts the portable form factor, or much lower capability is included, which counters your requirements. Battery tech is getting better, but not explosively like portable device capability has increased.